Municipalities often provide curbside recycling services that can accept a number of items for recycling, such as paper, plastic, glass, metal, etc. However, some recycling services are reluctant to accept shredded paper documents. Paper is composed of fibers. As paper is recycled over and over, the fibers become shorter and the paper products that can be manufactured from the recycled paper becomes more limited. While short fiber recycled paper still has some value, it is not as valuable as larger sheets of paper documents that have long fibers.
Once documents are shredded, it shortens the fibers and lowers the grade of paper from high grade to mixed grade. Mixed grade paper may still be recyclable, but it may be more difficult to find a recycling service that accepts shredded documents. For instance, a curbside recycling service that a typical homeowner uses for recycling may not accept shredded documents at all, thus forcing the homeowner to find other means of recycling shredded documents.
Although personal information may not exist on every page of a multi-page document, users generally shred the entire document to ensure that any personal information is not accessible after recycling. For instance, it would be unlikely that a user would simply include a bank statement, a credit card statement, a trading account statement, etc., in the common non-shredded paper recycling stream, as this would potentially result in a third party gaining access to the personal information of the user.
To minimize the number of pages or overall area for a particular document that should be shredded to destroy the personal information, the user may be tasked with locating various pieces of sensitive information that are dispersed throughout the document. However, the possibility remains that some piece of information may be missed. Users therefore often shred the entire document to prevent this from happening, which can generate a significant amount of hard-to-recycle material.